Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
Bob Arning arning@charm.net wrote: What I like about the different colors:
- I can quickly find windows I am looking for even when only a corner is visible under a pile of other stuff.
- It's a quick visual clue of what this window is about.
Others have said the same. But the same benefits could be obtained from coloured borders, especially if there were a new kind of corner.
The new kind of corner is rounded on the inside like rounded corners, square on the outside like square corners. This gives you a little "gusset" of border colour, quite noticeable.
Hey, that sounds nice! It could also make flopped-out scroll bars hanging beside rounded corners look much less ugly. I find the break in their outline quite sloppy-looking. (I've been wondering for some time how one would make half-rounded windows, round on top and square on bottom, to address just this issue. It's beyond my ken at the moment, but I think it would look great.)
As for the helpfulness of colors in general, I think they're great for quick recognition, but mostly when there are only a few windows in play. I tend to have a bunch of browsers open on different classes, and the colors don't help a bit with that. (Doug, much as I like Whisker, my 800x600 screen is just too cramped for it to be very useful. The text panes are too narrow.) The recent change to put the class name in the title bar is much more useful to me, on that front. (Who was responsible for that? Ned? Thanks!) I also tend to use spatial relationships almost as much as color, usually placing Workspaces (short and wide) in the lower left, Transcripts (tall and narrow) on the right, and so on.
-Jesse